This volume brings together revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the Second International Conference on &#8220;Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing&#8221; (RANLP&#8217;97) held in Tzigov Chark, Bulgaria, September 1997. The aim of the conference was to give researchers the opportunity to present new results in Natural Language Processing (NLP) based both on traditional and modern theories and approaches. The conference received substantial interest — 167 submissions from more than 20 countries. The best papers from the proceedings were selected for this volume, in the hope that they reflect the most significant and promising trends (and successful results) in NLP.<br />The contributions have been grouped according to the following topics: tagging, lexical issues and parsing, word sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution, semantics, generation, machine translation, and categorisation and applications. The volume contains an extensive index.<br />